Printing Unicode character in C

Question

Printing Unicode character in C

I'm trying to print the unicode star character ( 0x2605 ) in a linux terminal using C. I followed the suggested syntax of the other answers on the site, but I don't get the output:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <wchar.h>

int main(){

    wchar_t star = 0x2605;
    wprintf(L"%c\n", star);

    return 0;
}

Any suggestions would be appreciated, especially how I can make this library work ncurses

.

+3

c unicode ncurses

Luke collins May 07 '17 at 17:07

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2 answers

If you are using stdio or ncurses, you must initialize the locale as stated in the ncurses manual . Otherwise, multibyte encodings like UTF-8 don't work.

wprintw

doesn't necessarily know about wchar_t

(although it might use the same baseline printf

, it depends on platform and configuration).

With ncurses, you can render in wchar_t

any of the following ways:

storing it in an array wchar_t

and using waddwstr

or
storing it in structure cchar_t

(c setcchar

) and using wadd_wch

it as a parameter, or
convert wchar_t

to multibyte string and usewaddstr

+1

Thomas dickey May 07 '17 at 17:38

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Antti haapala · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-07T17:15:39+0000

Two problems: first, it wchar_t

must be printed with the format %lc

, not %c

. The second is that if you don't name setlocale

, the character set will not be set correctly and you will probably get ?

your star instead. The following code seems to work, though:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <wchar.h>
#include <locale.h>

int main() {
    setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "");
    wchar_t star = 0x2605;
    wprintf(L"%lc\n", star);
}

Printing Unicode character in C

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